Today, many (if not all) organizations tend to conduct substantial amounts of business electronically, and consequently, depend on having reliable, continuous access to information technology systems, applications, and resources in order to effectively manage business endeavors. At the same time, information technology threats ranging from viruses, malware, and data corruption to application failures and natural disasters are growing in number, type, and severity, while current trends in technology have presented information technology departments with a plethora of recurring challenges. For example, the need to do business at an increasingly faster pace with larger critical data volumes have amplified the pressure on information technology, which has led to efforts to consolidate, migrate, or virtualize servers and resources hosted thereon without disrupting operations or damaging resources. As such, even isolated failures have the potential to render information technology resources unavailable, which may cause organizations to lose substantial amounts of revenue or information that could impede or even cripple business. Although certain organizations have attempted to utilize backup solutions to protect the information that applications create, many backup solutions lack the restoration granularity required to quickly restore important data, while others demand full restoration to temporary disk space (even to recover one single file).
Consequently, many organizations have turned to complementary replication and high availability solutions to minimize downtime and protect critical applications and data, and moreover, efforts to implement server virtualization with Microsoft Hyper-V and other virtualization platforms have increased due to the potential that virtualization has to increase information technology flexibility, drive down costs, and accelerate time to market. Although mainstream virtualization adoption has the potential to enable simple, economical, and reliable disaster recovery strategies, many adopters tend to quickly discover that virtualization adds new complexity that can interfere with achieving data protection, system availability, and disaster recovery goals (e.g., because protecting virtual servers raises additional and/or different issues from protecting physical servers). In other words, even with all the potential benefits that virtualization can potentially offer, increasing diversity in virtualized computing environments introduces abstraction that requires a coordinated and cohesive management approach to realize the visibility, control, and automation essential to planning and deploying an organized, secure, and scalable virtualized infrastructure. For example, to the extent that some virtualization vendors provide data protection capabilities, these solutions typically only work on the particular platforms that the virtualization vendors deliver. As such, protecting applications and related data associated with virtual machines hosted on virtualized servers, whether implementing VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, or other virtualization technology, requires more than backup and restore solutions alone can provide because point solutions are not cost-effective and add complexity to managing a heterogeneous environment.
Accordingly, because disruptions to system and application availability and data loss typically translates to lost revenue, lower customer service and employee productivity, and even damage to reputation, organizations need more than point or platform-specific backup and restore solutions to achieve faster recovery times with continuous data protection, high availability to support demanding service level agreements and disaster recovery strategies, and business protection in modern fast-paced environments. Although virtualization has the potential to streamline information technology infrastructure and resource efficiency, reduce capital and operating costs, and improve business continuity, the risk that virtual deployments will proceed unmanaged and unsecured tends to increase with increased virtualization and abstraction. In particular, rather than achieving a consolidated and secure infrastructure, an uncontrolled virtual machine proliferation termed “virtual sprawl” may result instead. For example, without automated monitoring, alerting, and control, virtualization may create lag times in responding to business needs, provisioning resources, and implementing effective security measures. Furthermore, capacity planning and automation must be implemented to mitigate information technology inefficiencies, slow response times, and missed business opportunities. In a related sense, virtualization tends to cross multiple silos, which requires coordinated management and integration and time-consuming manual processes that can hinder performance and elevate costs.
In the replication, high availability, and data protection context, virtualized systems usually require installing appropriate engines on virtual machines managed therein in order to protect applications that may be running in the managed virtual machines. However, manually installing the engines on the virtual machines tends to be difficult, time consuming, and resource intensive. For example, usage information associated with a particular virtual machine may require the engine installed thereon to create several different high availability scenarios, including some that may be unnecessary or not relevant to user needs. Moreover, manually installing engines on individual virtual machines requires users to know how to configure different applications running therein (e.g., SQL, Exchange, SharePoint, etc.), which tends to introduce substantial human resource and information technology resource costs. Because each virtualization platform contains specific management tools, organizations tend to quickly feel the pain associated with multiple management solutions, uncoordinated manual processes, weak security measures, and inadequate tracking and reporting practices. As such, without a coordinated management approach, organizations may be unable to attain the promise associated with virtualization technology, which may instead become a burden that threatens to consume information technology resources, budgets, and reputations because information technology has become saddled with trying to effectively manage and scale resources while business users become frustrated because applications and services needed to dynamically respond to market opportunities may be unavailable or disrupted.